Ohio State student, shot four times, heads to fall semester with new outlook

Saturday

Aug 16, 2014 at 12:01 AMAug 16, 2014 at 7:34 PM

Bleeding profusely and struggling to breathe after he had been shot four times, Christopher Moeller asked a police officer whether he'd live.

Jim Woods, The Columbus Dispatch

Bleeding profusely and struggling to breathe after he had been shot four times, Christopher Moeller asked a police officer whether he’d live.

“I don’t know,” the Columbus officer replied.

It’s an answer the 25-year-old Moeller said he’ll never forget. Doctors at OhioHealth Grant Medical Center later told him he probably would have died after being shot on the East Side in December if he hadn’t been young and healthy.

Now, after losing a semester of college during his recovery, Moeller is going back to school. He is to resume his studies as an engineering student at Ohio State University when the fall semester starts at the end of this month.

“I don’t take anything for granted. Things in life don’t bug me anymore like they used to,” Moeller said recently from his Northwest Side apartment. “I have gone through one of the worst things that anyone can go through. I can’t imagine much worse.”

It was Dec. 9, and Moeller had just finished his last final of the semester — an evening test — at Ohio State. He headed back to the house on Eastmoor Boulevard that he shared with some other OSU students. Moeller was pursuing a second OSU degree, in engineering, after already earning a degree in communications.

As he drove toward the three-bedroom ranch that they rented, Moeller said his thoughts were on packing up to return home to northeastern Ohio for the winter break.

It was about 10:30 p.m. when he parked on Eastmoor in front of the house. Moeller said a man holding a handgun ran across the front lawn and told him: “Give me the keys, man!”

“I was scared,” Moeller recalled. “I took my keys and tossed them to him.”

The man became agitated, probably because the keys hit the ground in the dark, Moeller said. Standing about 25 feet from Moeller, he fired the gun four times.

Detectives later determined that the handgun was a Taurus Judge five-shot revolver. It has a 6-inch-long barrel that is capable of firing shot shells, said Chris McLaren of Vance’s Shooter Supplies on the North Side.

From the nature of Moeller’s wounds, McLaren guessed that the shells had been filled with birdshot.

“All I remember is the pain,” Moeller said.

The man who had shot him picked up the car keys but then ran off without taking the car.

Moeller crawled up the driveway and pounded on his front door. Then he called 911 on his cellphone and told the dispatcher, “I have been shot.”

Moeller said he didn’t know how bad his wounds were until the paramedics cut off his shirt. The four shotgun shells had sprayed more than 70 pieces of birdshot into his chest, arm and right leg.

“I lost a lot of blood,” he said.

Moeller spent about two months at Grant, mostly in intensive care. Surgeons removed his spleen and part of his pancreas. There were more operations to remove the shot-shell fragments. One of the shotgun shells had shattered his right knee. He couldn’t talk, eat or drink for a month, because of a tracheotomy to help him breathe.

After getting out of Grant, Moeller returned to his parents’ home near Cleveland. At one point, he spent a week in a hospital there because of an infection.

Moeller always planned to return to his studies.

“One of my first memories, and it was obviously the most-foolish thought ever,” he said, “was I thought the semester was going to start and I needed to get back to school.”

He didn’t make the spring semester, but he’s now ready for fall.

He describes himself as about 90 percent back to normal. He works — he doesn’t want to say where because his assailant is still unknown — and says an eight-hour day tires him. Moeller’s assault was featured by Central Ohio Crime Stoppers, but police have few leads, said Sgt. David Shimberg of the Columbus police assault squad.

“I feel sorry for him,” Moeller said of his attacker. “For somebody with the upbringing or lifestyle where they could shoot somebody in cold blood like that, I just can’t wrap my mind around that.”

As for himself, Moeller said, “I just appreciate things more in life — friends and family. I have an opportunity to get back to school, get an engineering degree and a job. And live my life."